People: Patrick Dowd

Hung with the same nostalgia deserving of a pair of boxing gloves worn in a championship bout,… Hung with the same nostalgia deserving of a pair of boxing gloves worn in a championship bout, a pair of old raggedy dress shoes – their soles worn through like those of a hobo – grace the wall above city councilman Patrick Dowd’s desk.

Their leather deeply scuffed and creased irreparably, the shoes are material evidence of Dowd’s unlikely ascension to his new post where he represents District 7 in the city legislature.

During his campaign for the school board in 2003, which chastened his later run for council, the virtually unknown Dowd relied on the oldest strategy in the election playbook: walking door to door through Lawrenceville, Highland Park and Spring Hill and asking voters directly for their support. Dowd alone canvassed 3,000 homes in little more than three months, and the shoes look the part.

“That’s what I do. I knock on doors,” said Dowd.

It paid off. Though he lost the Democratic Party endorsement 83-4, which normally assures its bearer a win, Dowd beat both the endorsed Democratic party incumbent and the endorsed Republican candidate by about 300 votes, an incredible upset in an election that only includes around 3,000 ballots.

A Post-Gazette cartoonist was so mystified by the outcome that he portrayed Dowd’s win with a takeoff on the Dewey Defeats Truman newspaper headlines following the 1948 presidential election.

As if to let the public know that it wasn’t all a dream, Dowd piloted an even more daring come-from-behind campaign to unseat incumbent Len Bodack, D-District 7, from his city council seat last fall. Bodack came from a political family and had the strong backing of the Democratic Party.

But again, Dowd buckled down, knocked on doors and turned the tide.

If that was the end of the story, forty-year-old Dowd might easily be characterized as someone who was just making headway on his lifelong political ambitions.

But that would be a far cry from the truth. The fact is that Patrick Dowd was still employed as a teacher just last fall, and he would have been happy to retain that position if he had lost the election.

Politics never happened to be part of Dowd’s aspirations. Rather, politics seemed to have happened to him.

And on top of that, even if his future did lie in politics, the insider nature of Pittsburgh’s machine would be a rebuff to most outsiders like Dowd, a native of Missouri.

But then again, Pittsburgh happened to Dowd, also.

Like so many young steel city transplants, Dowd had no plans of staying here when he arrived to do graduate work at Pitt in the fall of 1991.

“I figured I would get my degree and leave,” he said. “I had grown up with some kids that were from Pittsburgh, but I didn’t have a good image [of it].”

That image of steel and soot changed upon his first arrival.

The summer after graduating with his bachelor’s degree in history, Dowd drove to Pittsburgh for an interview with Pitt’s history department. It was his first trip to Pittsburgh.

“I came up the backside of what I now know as Mount Washington, and it was this beautiful, beautiful May night. And I had to stop and get out, and I was standing at what I now know as the overlook at Mount Washington, and I was saying to people, ‘Is this Pittsburgh?'” said Dowd, recalling his amazement at the city’s nightscape.

Dowd didn’t know it then, but this was the first moment in a series that would suture him to his adopted city.

Looking back on his years at Pitt, Dowd is certain of one thing: He never had the slightest idea he would end up in politics.

Though he had only taught at private schools, his interest in Pittsburgh’s public education system grew as his children – he now had six – entered the classroom one by one.

“The public school system was the critical thing. If public education wasn’t good in Pittsburgh, by our standards, then we were leaving. There was no way we would be able to afford tuition at Winchester [-Thurston] or Ellis,” said Dowd.

Dowd had kept up on city news all through grad school, and now in the classroom, he frequently peppered his lectures with rants about state and local politics, especially as it pertained to education.

“On a lark,” he decided to run for the 24th Pennsylvania State House seat. He wasn’t overly serious, admitting that his students sort of pushed him into it, but he did the legwork regardless. He knocked on doors and, to his surprise, found many people as excited about education as he. And he began to hear the same refrain.

“They would say, ‘you should run for school board,'” said Dowd.

Dowd lost the election, but kept in touch with many of the people he had met while campaigning.

He ended up co-organizing a community action group with the goal of electing a progressive representative to the school board. The group coalesced around November 2002 and began formulating ideas for public education in the city. By January they needed to find a candidate to begin campaigning for the upcoming election in May.

At first, he wouldn’t even consider it.

“I started off saying, ‘Look, I can’t do this. I teach at a private school. It’ll be a loser campaign.”

And beside his own weaknesses, Dowd was up against the school board president, a well-connected Democrat named Darlene Harris who would reunite with Dowd on city council.

But eventually he gave in and became the group’s candidate. On a “freezing, freezing cold morning” in early January, 120 group members convened at the Carnegie Library of East Liberty and formally nominated Dowd to run for District 2.

The polices on which he differed from Harris – consolidating schools to save money and focusing on student achievement rather than taxes – were largely addressed during his tenure over the next four years.

“When I took office on the school board it was split four, four and one, and I was the one. And by the time I left there, we split all over the place depending upon the issue, and we essentially dissolved those blocks. And I think we need to do the same thing here [on council],” said Dowd.

With the board divided over issues as specific as reductions in city-owned employee vehicles, the board has been anything but unified since Dowd began his term at the start of January.

Five months in he’s still learning and not too shy to ask other council members to explain procedures at council meetings.

But he points to early successes already: like the fact that he pushed Ravenstahl and other board members to pledge to form an intergovernmental taskforce in February. He thinks initiatives like this will enable the council to further cooperate on more significant endeavors.

It’s much too early to predict where he will end up, but the rate at which Dowd is seeking to separate himself from the pack is notable. His singular focus could just be a product of his excitement in putting his campaign promises into action. Or it might signify his wish to lead the council in a new direction.

But one thing is certain: Patrick Dowd has a new pair of shoes.